What's the future of the 'keyword'?

Episode Description

Most businesses rely on keyword match types and brand strategies in their PPC campaigns, but changes are underway that could impact performance significantly.

In this episode, Frederick Vallaeys spoke with PPC experts Jyll Saskin Gales and Andrew Lolk who shared insights on recent changes to Google Ads, including broader applications of match types and brand keyword management.

They discussed strategies for leveraging AI to enhance ad creative and the importance of understanding the interplay between keyword match types and brand strategies to optimize ad spend and effectiveness.

Watch this episode to learn:

• Effective ways to adapt to the new PPC landscape

• How AI can be used to refine ad messaging

• The role of brand keywords in current PPC strategies

• Challenges and opportunities presented by Google’s recent updates

and more.

Episode Takeaways

Changes in Keyword Match Types

• Google has announced changes that may significantly affect campaign management, notably with broad match keywords and negative keyword adjustments.

• The changes aim to reduce the manual effort in managing misspellings and variations by automatically capturing these nuances.

Brand Keywords and Inclusions

• Discussion on whether to bid on brand keywords varies based on competition and the specific market context.

• Google’s new settings allow for brand inclusions in broad match campaigns, aiming to focus broad match’s reach specifically on branded queries.

Impact of Google’s Changes on Campaign Strategy

• The modifications in keyword matching and brand inclusions necessitate a shift in strategy, where understanding and adapting to these changes is crucial for maintaining campaign effectiveness.

• PPC experts may need to shift focus from granular keyword management to broader strategic thinking about audience targeting and ad creative.

Future of PPC and AI Integration

• The role of AI in PPC is increasing, and the panelists discussed how this might standardize certain aspects of campaign management.

• Emphasis was placed on the importance of creative strategy in advertising, suggesting a return to fundamental marketing principles as AI handles more of the operational tasks in PPC campaigns.

Episode Transcript

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Hello and welcome to another episode of PPC Town Hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys. I’m your host. I’m also CEO and co-founder at Optmyzr, a PPC management software. So in today’s session, we’re going to cover some old stuff that’s recently become new again. Keyword match types. Google has recently announced some major changes to how keywords work.

Broad match everywhere. Negative keywords not just being exact anymore. So lots of changes that actually may have a pretty big impact on how you run your campaigns. So to talk about this, I brought in two great PPC experts to the show. And so with that, let’s get rolling with another episode of PPC Town Hall.

Andrew, Jyll, welcome to the show. Jyll, say hello to folks and tell them who you are.

JYLL SASKIN GALES: Hey, thanks for having me. I’m Jyll Saskin Gales. I use the pronouns she and her, and I’m a Google Ads coach, ex Googler of six years, and Google Ads coach and consultant for the last three and change.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Great. You’ve done a number of great videos for us, so thank you for doing those.

I particularly love the one you did on AI.

JYLL SASKIN GALES: Thank you.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And we can’t wait to hear what you think about something a little bit more basic like keyword match types, because like I said, a lot of changes to that, right? Also Andrew Hey, Andrew, welcome to the show, but I thought you were Danish. Tell people who you are and why you’re wearing a Belgian shirt today.

ANDREW LOLK: So I got very, very enthusiastic around the Danish national team’s progress in the euros. And I made a proclamation that if the, when we won against England, Germany, and then met Belgium in the semifinals on our way to the final, then I would, unless if that didn’t happen. Then I would wear a Belgium shirt on PPC town hall.

So here we are wearing horrible Jersey that sweats way too much on live camera. So yeah.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Love it. It’s a nice color. We won’t pressure you too much then so the sweat doesn’t start showing through the shirt. But yeah, it was, I was recently in Europe as well. It was quite hot. So I can imagine those soccer players.

Even the referees were drenched after 10 minutes. So it was a crazy thing. Now, before we dive into the whole PPC topic, because obviously we’re talking a little bit of soccer or football here. Jyll, you’re from Canada, right?

JYLL SASKIN GALES: Proud Canadian. Yes.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah. Do you know anything about their soccer team?

JYLL SASKIN GALES: We have one, and apparently they’re doing pretty well, you know.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: When Jyll showed up to the show and we had told her that we’d be wearing these Belgian jerseys, she actually wasn’t aware, I think, that Canada’s just placed fourth in the Copa America and was actually pretty close to taking third place. And that’s a whole lot better than the United States did, which is my second team of choice.

So congrats. Her team was the most successful in the recent run.

JYLL SASKIN GALES: Well, thank you. We Canadians are a humble folk. So, you know, I didn’t want to make you feel bad.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, well, thank you so much All right. So but let’s jump into the the digital marketing topics here. So Google has made a pretty big announcement and actually a number of announcement, right?

So let’s start with the one that happened probably about four weeks ago. Which was a change in how negative keywords will work Jyll, do you want to lead us off with that or actually andrew? Why don’t you take that one first? And i’ll let Jyll cover the the more recent updates

ANDREW LOLK: The update is that we no longer have to ask chat GPT to do misspellings and durations of every single word we want to exclude.

So if we want to exclude, like let’s say we’re selling something and wheelchair is a search term that. The, our keywords gets expanded into all the time. Then, and we go like, I don’t want to have anything to do with wheelchair. Back in the day we had to do wheelchair. We had to do wheelchair in two words.

We have to do single or plural. We had to think about all the different misspellings that could go wrong. So one negative keyword, one exclusion would rapidly turn into 10 or 20. And it was like, it’s a good old strategy that like, if you do one negative keyword, You have to do 20, otherwise you’re going to play whack a mole for the rest of the for the rest of the month chasing down those keywords.

The change is that, that’s no, we no longer have to do that. Now it’s going to capture misspellings and singular and plural. I will, I will do a little caveat as of the time of this recording, July 17th. I have not seen it in action yet. We don’t really, we have a couple of low volume accounts where it is very specific terms.

We don’t want wheelchair is one of them. And I haven’t seen the work yet. So as of this recording, it’s still not a hundred percent in action yet. And I haven’t heard anybody say that it’s actually working yet. But as, as a whole, it’s a massive improvement on how negative keywords worked in, in my opinion.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, a massive improvement if you care about those misspellings and typos, but I am a little bit concerned and maybe Jyll way in here because some of the examples that Google specifically is giving is if you have a negative keyword like minus YouTube. Now, the premise is YouTube could be misspelled thousands of ways according to Google.

But what about Google video service? That’s kind of the same as YouTube, right? So should that also be excluded? And does that risk now running into some of your positive keywords based on some of the terms you’ve chosen? And I think YouTube maybe is a safer example, but I’ll give you my own company name.

So Optmyzr, which is a misspelling of optimization. So could it be that I put in negative Optmyzr because I don’t want my brand in a specific campaign and Google expands our company name into the correct spelling Minus optimizing or optimization. And now all of my campaigns that are not brand, but are about optimizing keywords, would also be excluded.

So that’s sort of the risk that I see. But Jyll, tell us your take on this update from Google.

JYLL SASKIN GALES: I agree. I haven’t seen it in action yet, though I do find it Impressive that Google made this update, for lack of a better word. Normally, we’ve seen a broadening of match types. Google is always trying to get us to match to more audiences and more keywords.

And with this change, Google is actually narrowing the pool of keywords, the pool of user searches you’ll match to by expanding the way negative keywords work. So I just want to give like a little kudos to Google for actually doing that, first of all. But I have similar concerns that you do, Fred. I mean, you think about a brand name like Krispy Kreme, which is a misspelling.

You know, what happens there? What happens with words that are homographs? So, like add with two D’s, add with one D. Those two words have very different meanings. Is that going to be considered a misspelling? Or what if you want that intentionally? So I think mechanistically we have yet to see how this works.

I, like Andrew, haven’t seen it in action either. But I will say, like, Kudos to Google for releasing this. And I think on the whole, this is absolutely going to be a time saving feature and a useful feature.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah. And so one thing to keep in mind is order. Of priority that Google works in. So if you have a currently a positive keyword and then a negative keyword, the negative keyword will trump the positive.

And hence, that’s why we have tools and there are scripts that will find conflicts between negative and positive keywords in today’s change, or did the change that Google has announced, but it hasn’t rolled out yet. I sort of get this feeling that we almost need to change the prioritization. And if you have a conflict between a positive and a negative.

Yep. I think Google should actually start respecting the fact that you put in that positive keyword because the negatives are now becoming more broad and less specific. So that’s one call I do put out to Google. Do you guys, any thoughts on, would that be a decent strategy or how, or how do you prevent sort of these conflicts from happening unintentionally?

ANDREW LOLK: So like, if, if I may take this one, it’s like, like, you’ve heard me say this before, Fred, like, I have this bad habit. Big issue with some of these things Google is trying to do. They’re trying to make decisions for everybody. Just put the setting in there. Like allow us to set A and B they’re have an advanced section of settings on all campaigns.

Allow us to do it so that in, in like in the edge cases that we’re recognizing, like the Optmyzr case or different cases, allow us to set the settings, they can do whatever they want from a default, like they’ve always done. I was just perfectly fine, but let us override it. Let us find those edge cases.

Let’s override the settings that apply to ones that we want in the specific case that we want. That’s, that’s my take on it. Like, just give, give some

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: control back. But but yeah, I mean, so like Jyll is saying, this is a positive in terms of, we have to do less work for finding all of these misspellings.

But like you’re saying, Give us back the control. Don’t do everything for us, right? Maybe because there are really two groups of advertisers. There’s the the unsophisticated who are not agencies who don’t do this for a living. And for them, this is probably a great change. It’s going to make things easier and it’s going to eliminate some traffic, right?

And that, that may be okay. Or like you’d rather. Not spend the money on something bad. And have that see a little bit of an overall reduction in volume. That’s probably better than wasting money on things that you didn’t care about. But for us, where we actually manage this for a living, that, that level of control that you’re proposing, Andrew, sounds like a great idea.

So that’s another call for Google. Hey please give us a little switch in the campaign settings.

ANDREW LOLK: But they’ll never, they’re never going to do that. They like, they like, like, as long as you were like, even back when you were there, the mantra is always like, how do we raise the bottom level? How do we, how do we improve in the long tail of campaigns?

It’s never been, how do we make it easier for Walmart to advertise on Google? Like it’s, it’s like forever. It’s been like, how do we get an algorithm to do this better for everybody? And then if there’s some bigger edge cases, they’ll figure it out. Fred will figure it out. Jyll will figure it out. They’ll, they’ll, they’ll work out.

They’ll figure it out.

JYLL SASKIN GALES: But I think that’s a good thing. Most people who are advertising are not the kind of people who are tuning into PPC town hall or on Facebook. PPC Chatter and this stuff. It’s your average Joe Schmo with a local corner store shop that wants to spend a couple bucks on Google ads, and they can’t get the support.

And so on the one hand, taking away control is really hard for those of us who know what we’re doing. On the other hand, there are features like this that make it so much easier. And if we did put in All these different settings. It just makes it so much more bloated and so much more complicated. So other places where I think, you know, I miss the control that absolutely, but this is one we’re like, no, I’m not going to fight Google on this one.

This is a good change.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And another side benefit that we haven’t covered yet is the fact that Google says there’s going to be about 9 percent for. fewer hidden search terms as a result of this, because any misspellings that couldn’t show up in the search terms report because they didn’t quite have the volume and they didn’t meet the privacy thresholds, they will now be rolled into the whatever spelling you had.

And so through that aggregation, we’re going to see 9 percent more. Data now kind of the unspoken thing within this is yeah sure nine percent fewer hidden searches But the searches that we see are not actually the searches that are happening These are the typos that are now matching to some of our negatives So is that really a positive or is that just like spinning it?

ANDREW LOLK: That’s scary Because again, you didn’t, then you, you massively don’t know what it is that you’re being shown for. And again, we, we’ve all seen so many weird things happening. Again, there is, there are the edge cases, like, like Optmyzr. Like why don’t we convert as well on our brand terms? Like we used to do.

Oh, it’s because now it’s not actually optimized that we’re being shown for. It’s optimized. It’s a generic term. So that’s going to be, that’s going to be an interesting nugget to navigate. But again, that is an edge case. I’ll, I’ll look right at that.

JYLL SASKIN GALES: I think it’s a great change because the other search terms, the hidden search terms is such a huge issue.

Especially when I look at accounts for like 50 percent of their spend is going to other search terms. You can’t optimize what you can’t see. And so taking, you know, A percentage of those other search terms and be able to kick them up and actually show you what they are, I think, is very helpful for those of us, you know, who are tuning into PPC Town Hall and do know what we’re doing to have more visibility.

It’s 1 of the things that I know advertisers have been asking for for years to bring more things out of other search terms and show them to us. And so 1st, it was the change about a year ago. where you can see search terms that have had impressions, but no clicks. That was a great change. And so this now surfacing misspellings, even if they are low search volumes, we can see them, I think is a great change.

Not every change we’re going to talk about today I’ll think is so great, but these are changes I do think are great for all advertisers.

ANDREW LOLK: If we can just take a minute, is anybody like, does anybody understand the privacy argument here? Right. It’s like, I’ve never understood like how, like, how is taking what somebody searched for and not showing what we’re, what people search for clicked on and we paid for.

How is that a privacy issue? I can’t take that anywhere in my logs and go back to privacy issue here.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Exactly. Like do the YouTube example, like the fact that somebody couldn’t spell YouTube correctly. And now it’s like a one impression. Query, like that doesn’t tell me anything about who you are. Like even because sort of the notion is that, okay, some people they search for social security numbers or they search for names.

And like, these tend to be fairly unique queries. And I get that that needs to be removed. They can be like, like

ANDREW LOLK: how many, and how many ads show up for, for for a social security number, this can be identified. Like, so I recognize like that part of it. I, if something is identified into a search query, I get that.

But, but yeah, this only for

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: me to mismatch Andrew, is that like, I sort of get the whole privacy angle, but I don’t get how it leads to us seeing 20 percent of search terms being basically hidden. Like I can’t imagine there’s 20 percent of search terms that includes some sort of private sensitive information that needs to be filtered out.

And so what it leaves us are. These low volume impressions, but like you said, there’s nothing that allows us to connect that back to the actual person and do something nefarious with that. Now, Jyll, I mean, you did sort of, you said, yes, you do get the privacy angle. Is there something besides what we just covered that we’re missing?

JYLL SASKIN GALES: No, I think, you know, along with the search term, it’s not just about if there’s social security numbers inside it, especially with voice search, which has been around for years now, now with generative AI, like queries are getting longer and longer contain lots and lots more information is privacy. The true reason why every other search term is bucketed there.

No. But on the whole, when you have to dry a lot. Align somewhere. I do get that if something is really low search volume and could potentially, you know, it’s not just about someone’s identity along with that search term. There’s data about their location and device, all kinds of other things that could be there.

So do I think Google now overuses the privacy excuse? Yes, I do. But the basic underlying premise that when in doubt, we’re going to air towards privacy versus not privacy like Yeah, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll buy into that.

ANDREW LOLK: It only hurts small businesses. That’s the, that’s my only thing. So we work with like primarily in savvy work with really large appetizers.

We get plenty of data. This is 99 percent of cases. I never think about this. Then we got a low volume account the other day. Low volume B2B can’t see 60, 70 percent of searches. And we’re trying to build it up. Smart bidding doesn’t work. Volume, like the lead, like lead value, lead commercial value.

Is we haven’t really dialed it in. So we, we need to see the search terms to figure it out, figure out what, where to go, nothing to do, we can’t do anything. My thing here is like for large appetizers, 99 percent and savvy. We’re not hurt. Don’t worry anything about this. Small appetizer really hurting by, by this in my opinion.

JYLL SASKIN GALES: Well, that’s the bulk of my, I say two thirds of my coaching clients and people who join my courses are small business owners. So I do know that audience really well. And it’s absolutely a challenge when there’s a whole ton of search terms you can’t see. But is that the thing that’s going to keep you from getting good results or not?

No, you know, Google ads is complicated. There are lots of buttons and levers and things to do. And so one client, for example, you know, We saw what I mentioned before, half of their spend was going towards these other search terms. We made changes to match types. We added more negative keywords. We changed the bid strategy, and now less than 10 percent of their search terms are in other search terms.

So to me, it’s just kind of one step on that journey. To find out more, not because I need to see what’s in there, but what does that tell me about what’s happening here that half of our searches can’t be seen that half of our searches are low search volume that in and of itself is a signal to be about what’s going on now and what we might want to do to address that.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And so maybe that leads us a bit into this other update from Google, right? So we talked about the negative keywords. We didn’t talk about brand inclusion and exclusion. We’ll cover that in a bit, but there’s another setting which speaks to what you were saying, Joe, like maybe add more keywords, maybe get more broad.

So now by default, if you create a new campaign that will become a broad match campaign. A lot of people don’t know this. Jyll, what did Google do here? What is a broad match campaign? So

JYLL SASKIN GALES: now there’s a setting either when you create a new search campaign Or when you’re editing an existing one on the same page where you check, you know search partners or not display network locations There’s a box there called broad match keywords You can turn it on or off and until recently the default was off But if you turn it on, what that means is whenever you add a keyword to that campaign, it will only be added in broad match.

And if there are any keywords in the campaign right now, you turn that setting on, they will all turn into broad match. And so the big change, this box has been there for a while, but the big change is now on in broad match. Is the default and so if you don’t know that you don’t know to look and then you go to add keywords You might be adding your keywords in exact match with the moment you hit save It’ll just go to the next screen as if nothing happened and yet your keywords will then all be In broad match

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: and for people who are concerned about this like is there some visibility in your existing campaigns where you may have seen The match types do those match types disappear or do you still see them, but they’re not being respected

JYLL SASKIN GALES: Disappear so I just tested this.

In my tester google ads account And so if you have an existing campaign you go to the settings you turn on broad match keywords And then you go back and look at your keywords. Your keywords will all just be in broad match right away

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: All right, so yeah, let’s talk about broad match then now broad match or even let’s talk about exact match.

Exact match basically also became broad match to some degree. Every keyword has just like taken on a new level of broadness in the spectrum. So, so talk about that a little bit. Like, are we going to a place where maybe we think more about keywords as a search theme? Kind of the way that Pmax campaigns expose it or what do you see as the future of keywords?

JYLL SASKIN GALES: I think we’re definitely going in a search theme direction. Whenever I see a new feature come into performance max that tells me this is where Google wants to go, right? Because performance max is the present and the future of Google ads. Although funnily enough search themes remind me of how smart campaigns work where you put Pmax.

Quote unquote keywords into smart campaigns. They’re not really keywords at all. But yeah, I think we’re moving. We are already in a future where search campaigns no longer work. Like here are the kinds of searches I want to show on. I just want to show on these searches. You can’t do that anymore without playing a lot of whack.

We’re giving Google a general idea of the kinds of searches we want to show on. And pairing that with audience data to give Google an idea of the kind of people we would like our ads to show on. So less and less control. Is the norm. We all know that if you’ve worked in Google ads for any amount of time, exact match today is like the broad match of five years ago.

And I only see that trend continuing.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Andrew, how do you deal with that in sort of an agency setting?

ANDREW LOLK: So, so we work with just a reminder, but we work primarily with with e commerce, high volume e commerce. I do have a background doing small business and I still run my wife’s dental practice since Google ads, not that I touch it a lot, but we’ve done this for at least the last year.

We’ve treated everything as a search theme, putting in a wetsuit as a keyword and then wetsuit for kids, wetsuit for adults, wetsuit for diving, wetsuit for swimming et cetera, as different themes that hit different people that need different ads. We’ve, we’ve been doing this for about a year because the, the old practice with Adding the keyword wetsuit for kids, kids wetsuit, child’s wetsuit, wetsuit for four year old.

It’s so much work and it’s so unnecessary in general. There are edge cases where we go and we say, Hmm, why are we not getting shown for bulk or wholesale wetsuits? Well, the key, for some reason. Maybe again, that goes back to maybe the ad doesn’t mention anything with wholesale bulk. So the CTR on them have been pretty low.

So we’ve been not been shown adding those keywords and working your way through that works really, really well. But as a whole opening up an e commerce account, going wetsuit, children’s wetsuit, wetsuit for adults and different in different ad groups. And then simply just treating them as themes has been the way that we’ve structured campaigns for at least a year because.

Let’s go back to what we started talking about exact match isn’t exact match anymore and leaning into that and simply just like Jyll said to begin with using it as the good it is. I do think that this is a good thing. Like I, I don’t feel, I don’t have the need to go in and add a bunch of keywords and various different, various different variations and stuff like that.

I like this. I’m going for the theme. Smart bidding bids on a search term level. There are some things with how do you actually work with this then on an ongoing basis to make sure, Hmm, if this wholesale keyword is not shown anymore, why is that? And how do we then get that back? That then becomes a really big thing because we don’t have that visibility in general, but yeah, we’ve done it for at least a year and I’d advise everybody to to go that route.

JYLL SASKIN GALES: You made a great point, Andrew, about creative as well. I think creative is so much more important now in Google ads than it was a few years ago, because keywords don’t work the same way they used to. And then audiences are becoming less durable with, you know, iOS privacy and deprecation of third party cookies coming someday in the future.

So audiences don’t work as effectively as they used to. And so what you have left, you have. The creative, which needs to more than ever communicate. Who is this offer for, and who is this offer not for? And so that’s somewhere I see a lot of Google ads, practitioners having to play catch up. Cause I think for a lot of us, creative has been an afterthought for many years, whereas now it’s even more important than ever before.

ANDREW LOLK: And I just want to say one thing that when we say creative here, we’re just talking about text, like we’re just talking about text ads and nobody that’s sitting and listening to this should start adding like a bunch of videos and, and, and banners to their. Campaigns. That’s not what we’re talking about.

We’re simply just talking about just writing better ads. Like we, we took over an account right up to their high season that sells like, like bathing like swimwear and swimming goggles, all stuff for summer. All their ads were just. Buy keyword here and then something else and the other ones and seven accounts in Europe, like seven different countries went in proof to point in the main market, wrote better ads within the RSA framework, simply just wrote better ads.

And CTR jumped out by two, just putting in a little bit of work. And again, for me, this really goes back to the search themes because the account that we inherited had everything built up. Like again, every single ad group was a new keyword. So it was to go to old SKAG approach, single keyword ad groups.

So every single time, so one campaign for wetsuits had 90 ad groups or something like that. I reduced that to 10 and then to four afterwards. And now I have four ad groups. I have to write ads for it so I can write much better ads because it’s grouped better because it’s search themes. And that’s, that’s, that’s a side effect of using search themes.

In my opinion, is the writing better ads become a lot more doable because you don’t have to write as many. So that’s something I’m, I’m really, really optimistic about using when it comes to search themes.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: So it sounds like an evolution of the PPC role. We used to spend a lot of time finding misspellings and keywords and every possible variation of that.

Now you’re saying, let Google handle that and we can focus more on sort of making a compelling marketing message. So maybe more back to marketing roots, which is about messaging, promotion, connecting with the human on the other end of that ad and compelling them that you have the right product.

JYLL SASKIN GALES: Cause that’s something generative AI.

Is still not doing well. I don’t know if you’ve used the sort of, yeah, create my ad for me within the Google ad interface. It is so basic. It is laughable and don’t get me wrong. It’ll get there. I’m sure it’ll get there, but right now,

ANDREW LOLK: will it, like, if you look like again, if you look at 99 percent of small business websites, they all say the same thing.

So where should AI get the input to do something more unique?

JYLL SASKIN GALES: Where we’ll get the input to assume, well, AI brings everyone to the average. That’s why like with smart bidding, everyone has access to smart bidding. Everyone can get average results, right? I think there are a lot of people now who have very below average creative text assets, whatever it might be.

And AI will do a good job of bringing them up to speed. Like even the format you mentioned, Andrew, a buy insert keyword here. So many businesses don’t even do that part. Right. So, AI can bring people to the average but average is not good enough if you’re going to drive better results and profitable results in 2024 and beyond.

And so that’s where you, a thinking human with instincts and understanding perhaps with a little bit of training in copywriting if you don’t have it, can write something that is just better than the average. Then what I can do, at least today and that’s an advantage. That is not a hard advantage to seize right now.

Whereas there are other advantages like CPC advantages or conversion rate advantages that are much harder to achieve than just. Writing better text.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, and level the playing field, right? The title of my second book, basically, like, listen, AI is making us all average. How do we tilt it back in our favor?

The people actually thinking about this day to day, the marketers, the professional marketers. What levers do we have to control this now? But it is a fair point that You know, where does the A. I. Get the inspiration for the better ad if you haven’t told it who your audience is, if you haven’t told it what your unique value proposition is.

And so oftentimes the what it was really helpful at is, okay, I’ve got 10 headlines for my R. S. A. Find me the next five to just fill that out, complete it. But what about. Taking it further, right? And that’s where we, so I have three human roles where the human helps the machine perform better. So as the PPC doctor, the PPC pilot, the PPC teacher but I’m playing with this idea of the, the PPC chef.

And so if you think of GPT as a chef in a kitchen and you ask it to cook up a great dish, well, I mean, you didn’t tell it much, so it could be an Indian dish that comes out, it could be French cuisine, it could be something that’s using insects and all like. Totally new and something nobody would want to eat necessarily today.

But is that wrong? Well, no, that’s not wrong because you just asked it to make you a dish. But if you give a context and you said, well, here’s my ingredients, here’s my brand guidelines for my company. Here’s the products we sell. Here’s why we’re unique. Okay. Now it’s got something to work with. And then we should expect AI to do a much better job and actually write those great ads.

ANDREW LOLK: If I were ever going to take a job anywhere, like one of the things that I think is very, very interesting is like this whole, like. Like how to build this ecosystem inside Google, because what you’re, what you’re explaining there can be solved by a three step prompt. What’s like, tell me like three words about your business or put anything in about your website.

Okay. Boom, boom in there. And then that should then like source three to five questions that. That the advertiser should just like answering just one sentence. Like what makes you unique? What, like, what’s special? Like, why did you start your business? And like, or like certain, some of these things. So, so, so like, again, it’s not you prompt engineer, like playing prompt engineer, but that engineers you to get to the right prompt and get the right information in there.

Because like, I like that. That’s definitely,

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: I remember correctly, the way that Google campaign set up works is it starts with asking for keywords and then it asks for the. The ad for that. But in a way, the ad is more telling about, okay, this is why we’re unique. This is what we or even more specific would be start with the landing page.

And it does ask you for the landing page now. But like you were saying, Andrew, so many small business landing pages are generic. They are based on templates, and they don’t really say anything unique. And so maybe, maybe that’s how we shift our mindset is let’s not start from the keyword first, but let’s start from like, what’s so special about this business, right?

What makes them unique? And then from there, you write ads that highlight that. And then the keywords, well, I’ll give some search themes around it, but like Google figure out that last step.

ANDREW LOLK: Just to finish that thought, like, because like one thing that I’ve, that I’ve done for many, many, many years is I’ve, I hardly ever write ads the same time I create a campaign.

Cause for me, writing ads takes such a long time to do well. And if I’m sitting and thinking about, I need these keywords structured in this way, if I also have to think about what the ads should look like. I don’t know what happens. I’m, I like to say I’m a fairly smart person. That I think a lot about, like, I only drink tea.

I don’t drink coffee at specific times. So I, I, I tend to think that I am fairly optimized internally. I can’t, I can’t do those things at the same time. If I, if I create the campaigns on day one and I write the ads on day two or day seven, my, my ad output is much, much, much, much better. You can think like there’s a structure going in there with Google as well.

Like how do you separate these two completely? But yeah.

JYLL SASKIN GALES: Well, I think as well, writing great at it, of course, isn’t just about your business and your offer. It’s about the user. And that’s such a cliche now focus on the user. All else will follow. But it’s really true. You could have the same offer and different ads would speak to different audience segments.

And in this world of search themes rather than keywords and audience signals rather than audience segments, that piece is more important. Then ever is making sure it really appeals to your target audience, but also not appeals to your not target audience, because that’s where the wastage really comes in.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: So I think to make our to not be the 95 percent of marketers who lose their jobs as Sam Altman said, because AI is taking over, I think both of you added a really interesting perspective to that. So Jyll is saying be a marketer first. First, as opposed to like the data geek who ended up doing PPC and works in spreadsheets to come up with a gaJyllion keywords, right?

No, that’s that’s done by the machine. Let’s go back to marketing and like, what’s that value proposition? And then I think what Andrew was saying, which is also really. Important is there’s a lot of these frameworks that are in place because of how Google ads worked for the past 20 years, but that’s being upended.

And so if it makes more sense to put in place a process that makes you more effective as a human to work with these newfangled tools, I And do keywords one day and do attacks another day. Like it’s the process that creates the winning agency and being consistent about that process, having optimized that process and, and not just going through the steps that Google wants you to, but doing it the way that actually makes your clients more successful.

So I think both of those are things hopefully our listeners can learn from. So with that, let’s let’s shift gears a little bit. Let’s talk about brains, right? So there’s a little bit of a shift as well in all of this broad match and negative changes as far as how brains work. So let’s maybe talk first about the importance of brand keywords and brand campaigns, and I’ll, I’ll let, Andrew, start with that.

And then let’s talk about brand inclusions and brand exclusions which are partially new and part of the announcement that Google made a couple of weeks ago, but Andrew, why don’t you lead us off with the big age old question, like should we advertise on brand keywords and where do they fit into a strategy?

ANDREW LOLK: So I’ll start with a quick story. So I, so again, I’ve been doing this for many years and I’ve, I’ve, I’ve talked to different agencies. A lot of people have different thoughts on these things. And I remember we, we lost a client four or five years ago. And I wrote, wrote him like, actually left like, Hey, you guys know, you stopped doing brand bidding.

It used to be this, this used to be very important. He wrote back like that, basically I’m an idiot. And this is like, you’re not supposed to do brand bidding. He’s wasting so much money on it. Believes that this is the way to go. Two months later, he turns on his brand keywords again, and he writes back my apologies.

I was an idiot. It definitely works. And I think it explains so much, like, everybody’s in different situations. One client is in a non competitive field in some obscure country called Denmark with no compensation for their brand term. Should they be bidding for their brand term? No, absolutely not.

There’s no need to do it. I run a TTC brand in the U S you know what happens three days after you start any significant DC brand. Amazon starts bidding on your brand term saying best deals with one day shipping on your brand term. You can’t get out of the way because you’re still waiting for your trademark application to go through, which takes 12 months.

That’s significant that they write that. And then if they link, of course, link to all your competitors with one day shipping. So we’re all in very, very different situations when it comes to brand bidding. And I think there’s, there’s never a one. Like there’s not one answer to whether or not you should be bidding for your brand terms or how you should be bidding for your brand terms.

There’s also a very big difference in whether or not you are a DTC brand, where your product is your brand term, or you are a wholesaler that’s starting e commerce out where you already have a massive amount of competition. So a company like Nike, or if we take a smaller, like any mid level DTC brand has a big wholesale experience Wholesale exposure, their brand keywords are not a brand.

It’s not a brand keyword. That’s like a mid funnel keyword where people kind of know that I get that. I know this brand, I’m searching for this brand. They’re not searching for it because they’ve just gone through your Facebook funnel, they’re searching for it because they saw somebody wear your shoes.

So there are so many different levels of what brand. Keywords actually are. And now we’re actually getting into this phase where performance max is like making all this even more confusing because people are saying to include it because it adds more conversion data and then it will feed the rest of the system, which I call absolute BS on.

It’s not true. I’ve seen some cases where I can’t explain why performance goes away. It goes worse after I take away brand terms, that whole thing with like one thing feeds the other. I simply don’t trust it. There’s something else that goes in there, but there’s just so many Different situations where you don’t know whether I should be bidding for your brand term.

So that’s where I end up going. So like, okay, how do we find out if bidding for our brand term is a good idea? And that’s really going through like a one, two, three stage process, figuring out how much competition do I have? What category is my brand term? And is it in, is it a top funnel? Is it a mid funnel?

Is it a bottom funnel completely? And so we just thereby start testing. How much should we be bidding for it? How much should we be we be spending for it? How much budget do we have? We have clients in, in Savvy that are very big. Where bidding for their brand term would roughly cost us half of the budget we’ve built.

That’s a no go like it’s, it’s an absolute no go to do because when we’re not driving a lot are much incremental value by doing that. Are we defending the brand a bit? Yeah. No, the client doesn’t see any value in it. Then we have others where it’s like everybody’s bidding for each other’s brand term is massively incremental.

We see it all the time. We have clients who are bidding for Interflora in, in, in Europe. Which is a big flower delivery service drives hundreds, even thousands of conversions a month. We’re just one in one country. So it can really, really have a big impact if you don’t defend your brand really well. And with all the changes to search search math types with P max.

I’ve gone from going two years ago. I went, if somebody’s bidding for my brand term, I attack you person as a person, you are actively going after me and you’re being an ungentlemanlike person to today. I’m going, there are like 10 different ways that that can happen with PMAX, with broad match, with affiliates, with like so many different ways that’s going to happen. So it’s also at a lot more competition on brand terms lately, which makes the conversation even bigger.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Very interesting. Jyll, what’s your take on brand?

JYLL SASKIN GALES: When in doubt. Lacking any other context, I say start with keeping brand included, whether that means having a branded search campaign or keeping brand included in your PMAX or whatever it might be.

Angela, I did a great job outlining the different scenarios where you may want to advertise or not advertise. I say, when in doubt, do it. Advertise on it. It’s going to have a high ROI for you. And then from there, determine if you want to make a change. Like for example, there was an account I audited about two weeks ago.

They had a bunch of brand search, non brand search and performance max. And when I looked at the search theme insights for performance max, every single conversion came from a branded search term, just every single one. And so that was a situation where I’m like, well, we have a branded search campaign.

The agency here has gone to the trouble to add all these text assets and images and all kinds of things for PMAX to try to do what it should do, and it’s just sticking to brand, because it’s doing what it’s supposed to do. It’s supposed to maximize conversions, and that’s the way to maximize conversions.

So that would be a situation where. My recommendation was let’s try excluding brand from PMAX. Of course, the CPA is going to rise. But as a result, we’ll actually be able to gather that new traffic, which is what we were looking to do. And then I’ve looked at other accounts where there’ll be running PMAX.

They don’t have brand excluded. And you know what? It’s not going after brand either. Cause it’s respecting keyword prioritization. They’re using exact match brand terms elsewhere, or, you know, they have really great. Assets are really great data going on a really great offer high converting website. So Pmax is able to bring in that new traffic.

So say a lot to say, I guess, just recapping what the changes are. Is you can now exclude your brand from performance max campaigns. You’ve been able to do this for some time. That’s called a brand exclusion. And then you can also include your brand with broad match. So there’s a way now where you can use broad match keywords in a search campaign.

But have it so it only includes searches that have to do with your brand. So basically Google trying to get people to move away from exact and phrase match keywords for brand use broad match keywords on your brand, but add this brand inclusion previously called brand restriction. So that broad match does its broadness, but only on things that have to do with your brand.

So that’s a feature I haven’t personally tested yet. The brand inclusion for Broadmatch it would probably take a lot to get me to try to trust Broadmatch. I hate everything about it. Have you tried it, Andrew?

ANDREW LOLK: I hate everything about it. It goes against everything in, in, in Google ads history that you’re supposed to do, you’re supposed to match the keyword to the ad that matches the landing page.

If I have a, if I’m running a keyword like Nike shoes, I want, the ad needs to show Nike shoes. It’s not supposed to land on Adidas shoes. It’s not supposed to land on running shoes because Well, it’s

JYLL SASKIN GALES: saying it wouldn’t, right? It’s saying it’s brand inclusion, only Nike branded searches. That’s what it says.

ANDREW LOLK: Why am I, that just seems like, like, why do we have to do that? Like if we talk about like unnecessary settings that we shouldn’t have, like, that’s like, for me, that sounds like so unnecessary to have that, to use that setting. Well, and then

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: this goes back to the broadness of this, right? So both on the inclusion and the exclusion with YouTube example, if you say brand inclusion on YouTube, it will show your ad for Google Music Service something something because Google Music Service is now YouTube.

So it saves you the time of having to think of every possible variation. Or indication of something. It’s not even a misspelling. It’s just like an indication, semantic indication of the user that they were looking for your thing, but they didn’t know it was called YouTube. Now, again, the question, the jury’s out, like, does it actually understand your brand or does it start doing weird things?

And I think that’s where the key message is going to be. We have to monitor it, like as this turns out from Google and as we deploy it, either through an inclusion or exclusion we have to look at the data and then make sure it’s taking the traffic to where we want it to because, because Andrew is right as well.

I mean, the scent of the query is not preserved and you could, it’s showing the wrong thing for the wrong search. Well, then, yeah, you’re not going to convert. You’re still going to pay money to Google, which is going to make them happy, but you’re not going to get the conversion.

JYLL SASKIN GALES: But here’s how it could be helpful.

And whenever I hear an announcement like this. Usually my first reaction is, Oh crap, what am I going to do? And then it’s, okay, how could this be a good thing? I always try to do, how could this be a good thing for my clients? And so with brand inclusions for broad match, there are two things. First of all, broad match behaves differently than phrase and exact match.

It takes into account all different signals like landing page content, et cetera. So in theory, in theory, webpage or whatever it might be. And the second thing is because exact match is so broad. If you have brand keywords in exact match, you will match the competitors. I’ve seen it in multiple accounts now.

So even if you have an exact match keyword on your brand, you’re still not going to only advertise on your brand. So it’s possible that this brand inclusion for broad match. Actually is a way, if it works as intended, to only serve ads on brand searches. Whereas if you’re using Phraser, Exaction, or Brand Campaign, you’re going to serve beyond your brand anyway.

So do those things pan out in real life? Too soon to tell. I’m just starting to see these things implanted in accounts. But if I try to put my optimistic, Viewpoint on which I like to try to do those are potential benefits to this brand inclusion for broad match feature.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, that’s a great point.

And as we figure out what’s actually happening here versus what’s announced and what’s the theory of how it should work. Tell people how to read what you got because both of you produce amazing stuff. So Jyll, what’s the best place for people to catch up with you and see how it’s actually paying out?

JYLL SASKIN GALES: Yeah, I have the Inside Google Ads podcast, which I release every Thursday. Answering your burning questions about Google ads. And I also have a monthly Google ads newsletter. You can sign up for, for free at learn. Jylljll. ca.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Great. And Andrew, what about your resources that people can use to follow?

ANDREW LOLK: So I, we primarily have, I primarily have two things.

One we, I, I, I send out all unfiltered thoughts on LinkedIn and Twitter. So that’s both good and bad. And then we write a, I write a blog roughly a couple times a month where we go a little bit more in depth. And one of the latest articles is actually why I disagree with Jyll on the default to brand. Because that would be something that I think everybody should read because it goes really much in depth with this brand bidding. And why I disagree with it. And again, it’s on their specific scenarios that I disagree. It’s not in general. But I’ve just seen so many DTC brands, especially that’s heavy on meta go in and launch PMAX and then spend 20, 40, a hundred grand.

And you’re like, this is an incremental. I’m not getting anything out of it. The Google doesn’t work. No. You just spent 80, 000 for a click to your homepage on your brand term. That’s what happened. Nothing else. So you just did it wrong and you don’t know that you did it wrong. And then you try to put it in terms that they understand.

Like, it’s like if you’re only doing retargeting in your ASC campaign and they go, Whoa, that makes perfect sense. So. Did you see brands need to learn a lot about Google before they start? I love how we do that.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Three Andrews performing a little back and forth between the customer, three voices of it.

But, but tell people the URL where they can sign up for your newsletter.

ANDREW LOLK: So savvy revenue. com. We have pop ups everywhere. Just get the, whatever notion template we’re offering at the moment. Then you’ll get into the you’ll get into the newsletter. Otherwise, Andrew Lok on Twitter and LinkedIn are primary sources.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Very good. And then Andrew, you’re taking on clients. Jyll, you have a course. So anything else that people should know about you before we wrap up today?

ANDREW LOLK: So no, it’s just one, one mentioned. So we, we have spots for two e commerce advertisers, primarily in Europe for this fall that we, that we’ve opened up for.

So if anybody wants to take advantage of Savvy and us managing their Google ads, then we can do that for you. We have two spots for this fall and winter and Q4 period. We don’t launch any collaborations later than October 1st. So it’s August latest to start talking with us. If you want Q4 to start working.

JYLL SASKIN GALES: Very smart policy to have there. I do not offer Google ads management, but I do offer one on one Google ads coaching training for agencies. So if you’d like a little personalized help with your Google ads account, you can find me at Jyll. ca j y l l. ca.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: All right, Jyll and Andrew, fantastic stuff. Thanks for sharing the latest on what’s new with Google’s policy changes around keywords.

Obviously a lot more to come. So we’ll continue discussing this, but do take advantage of those great resources that both of our panelists today put out. And if you find this interesting and you want to know about future episodes as they get launched, please hit the subscribe button at the bottom and also review the show on the podcast system of your choice.

And with that, Thank you to Jyll and Andrew. Thank you for watching. I will see you for the next PPC Town Hall.

JYLL SASKIN GALES: Thank you.